“I switch perfumes all the time. If I’ve been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection…Odors are at once evocative and suggestive, redolent with significance.”
-Â ANDY WARHOL
“Good times equate with good smells: even cow manure smells great because it evokes such wonderful memories; conversely, bad times equate with bad smells.” – ANTONY SYNNOTT Continue reading Good times
Germany will shut down its remaining black coal mines by the end of this year. This plan seals the fate of the sector that powered the country’s industrial revolution and post-war economic miracle. Since its early beginnings in the early 1970s this fundamental shift has had widespread implications the former industrial heartland of Germany. Given its links to human memory smells are medium of choice to work on the end of an industrial age.
Thus, the Art Museum at Mühlheim an der Ruhr takes this opportunity to invite Helga Griffiths, an artist who has been working across the boundaries of science, technology and different media (including the sense of smell) for quite a while. We have previously wrote about her work.
For the upcoming exhibition (6 May – 16 September 2018) Griffiths starts with coal as a material for different transformative processes. Destillation technologies are used to arrive at the essence of coal. A special scent edition will be offered on the occasion of this exhibition (allowing the user to keep memories of this passing industrial age).
“Perfumes are the soft-focus lense on our rough daily existence. They are the invisible, user-friendly interface in daily human interaction. They are sheer present – yet we have unearthed their primordial past. They seem pure phenomenon – yet they contain memory, erratic and unpredictable. And although they seem to lend themselves so well to the game of pure simulation, they do have dark and uncanny origins.” – HANS RINDISBACHER
Scents of Exile is an olfactory art project curated by Ashraf Osman in partnership with Syndicate and Givaudan. It takes as its point of departure an evocative text about memory, identity and nostalgia associated with scents of cities and places no longer accessible, from In the Presence of Absence by renowned Arab poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Olfactory Memoirs challenges both emerging and experienced writers to reconstruct memories through the sense of smell. Continue reading “What is smell’s relationship to narrative?”
